
Sources of productivity from technology in the NHS
Done well (that is to say, good products implemented effectively to solve known problems), digital and technology can genuinely play a role in reducing failure demand, increasing efficiency, and enabling the NHS to get more bang for its buck. The sources of productivity in the NHS are well rehearsed but here are a few examples.
Application to front line care
Electronic patient record (EPR) systems
According to recent data (Kurdi, 2025), 91% of trusts now have an EPR. An EPR is a digital system for storing and accessing patient records in real time, across care settings. EPRs drive productivity by eliminating duplication, reducing administrative burden, and improving the speed and safety of clinical decisions. Fundamentally they put the latest information about a patient into the clinician's hands.
Case study - Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
The introduction of an EPR system at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust reduced paper-based outpatients records by 80% and made patient information digitally available to clinicians in real time to help inform decision making (NHS England). This has delivered a £1.2m net reduction in the annual budget for health records and has released 1,680m2 of hospital space for operational use.
Telehealth and remote patient monitoring
The use of video consultations and home monitoring technology can be used to help care for patients outside hospital settings. This helps to reduce hospital attendances, frees up staff time, and helps patients to manage conditions proactively in a setting they prefer. These technologies are particularly effective for managing long-term conditions like diabetes and heart failure.
Case study - Health Call
Health Call, an NHS-owned digital company, developed a smartphone app that care home staff can use to monitor and manage the long-term health of residents by recording daily observations. The information, held securely in the app, provides a way for doctors and other clinicians to review the resident and offer guidance for their care while the resident is in their home.
Published in Age and Ageing, the official journal of the British Geriatrics Society, researchers looked at the impact of using the Health Call app for 8,702 residents in 118 care homes across the North East of England between 2018 and 2021.
By linking routinely collected NHS secondary care data from County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust with data gathered within the care homes, the team showed that using the Health Call app reduced the number of attendances to A&E by 11%, and unplanned emergency admissions by 25% (Mathisen, 2024).
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in diagnostics or treatment planning
The use of diagnostic tools (e.g. radiology AI for X-rays or MRIs) can help speed up analysis and improve diagnostic accuracy. These technologies are also used in treatment planning to support more personalised approaches to therapeutic care.
Case study - Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has implemented an AI tool named 'Derm' for rapid skin cancer diagnosis. Using an iPhone with a magnifying lens, clinicians capture images of suspicious moles, which the AI analyses in seconds. This system boasts a 99.9% accuracy rate in ruling out melanoma, allowing nearly half of the patients to receive immediate all-clear results. The remaining patients are promptly scheduled for specialist consultations. By reducing the traditional 20-minute examination to a five-minute process, the hospital has significantly decreased waiting lists and enabled doctors to focus on more severe cases (Hayward, 2025).
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPAs emulate human actions, allowing bots to interact with computer systems. RPAs are used in healthcare to automate repetitive administrative tasks (e.g. data entry, scheduling). Automation reduces errors and frees up staff time for higher-value tasks.
Case Study - Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust introduced RPA to streamline recruitment and administrative tasks. A robot named 'Lizzie' automates the assignment of junior doctor rotas and generates sign-ins for new starters, reducing the time spent on each schedule from five minutes to just 1.7 minutes. Overall, the automation has saved over 90 days per year in processing time and realised £53,000 in savings in the first year, with projections of £500,000 over five years (NHS Employers, 2021).
ePrescribing and medicines administration
The use of digital systems can help manage the end to end medication process, from the generation of a prescription to the recording and administration of medications to patients. These systems aim to reduce medication errors and improve patient safety. In addition they streamline pharmacy workflows and provide improved inventory control.
Case study - Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
Following the successful implementation of an electronic prescriptions and medicines administration (ePMA) system, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust reported improved medicines safety across the trust, greater visibility of prescriptions, improved staff satisfaction levels and reduced prescribing errors (Department of Health and Social Care, 2020) .
Clinical decision support (CDS) systems
These systems enable the integration of population-based evidence with the characteristics of individual people to provide situation and patient-specific recommendations to support clinical decision-making.
Case study - Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust used a CDS to help recognise deteriorating patients. The CDS was used to generate an electronic alert when a patient’s clinical observations met the sepsis criteria. A series of electronic prompts within the EPR guided clinicians through the actions and tests needed to diagnose sepsis. Clinicians then select and order the most appropriate antibiotics to treat the source of the infection, with the system recommending the correct dose and frequency in accordance with the patient’s clinical status and in-built national medication guidance (NHS England, 2023). Since the introduction of the sepsis alert, the trust has seen a 42% reduction in mortality (Health Tech Newspaper, 2019).
Applications to workforce management and data
In addition to using health technologies to deliver front line care and support clinical decision making, technology has also been applied to support ‘back office’ functions such as administrative tasks, workforce planning and data analysis.
Workforce management systems
Digital tools can be used to help optimise the planning, scheduling and management of healthcare staff. Common applications include support with rostering and staff allocation to reduce reliance and spend on agency staff.
Case study - University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust deployed an e-rostering system ‘HealthRota’, that maps the appropriate number of staff with the necessary skill mix onto the shifts that need to be covered to ensure efficient cover provision. In addition, the system provides increased staff flexibility by giving staff the ability to share their availability for work, swap shifts and receive their rotas directly via email. As a result, the cost of using locum doctors to cover shifts was significantly reduced, there has been improved retention of staff due to greater flexibility and reduced burnout. Better staffing of A&E since HealthRota was introduced has improved clinical safety and patient outcomes, with a 68% reduction in emergency calls made at weekends (NHS England, 2022).
Health population analytics
Analysis of health data at a population level can help to identify trends, understand health needs and highlight disparities. Data-driven insights are used to enable services to act early, reduce health inequalities and target support and resources where they will have the greatest impact in improving patient health outcomes.
Case study - The Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System
NHS staff across the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System used population health data to link and collate datasets for high intensity users of primary care. Through linking data, they found this patient cohort were also known to the council as residents needing assisted bin collections. By bringing this data together they were able to build a richer contextual picture of these individuals, and carry out further assessments which identified additional unmet needs such as limited mobility, social isolation and obesity. As a result, the team was able to provide additional personalised support to meet people’s needs and improve outcomes (Khandavalli, 2019).
Shared care records
By joining up an individual’s separate healthcare records from different health and care organisations digitally in one place, a shared care record can help clinicians to build a holistic view of a patient’s health journey.
Reported benefits
Current NHS initiatives have illustrated that shared care records have benefits for patients and clinicians (NHS England, 2025), including:
-
A reduced burden on patients to repeatedly recall their medical history to different healthcare professionals.
-
Improved efficiency by avoiding the need for repetition of medical tests.
-
Saving time by reducing the need for healthcare professionals to manually request patient information.
-
Improving health and care professionals’ holistic understanding of an individual to better inform clinical decision making.